Van Gogh's Room at Arles (22 page)

“A dainty dish to set before the King,” the King said.

“Oh,” she said, “you two!” And she might have been some cosseted Midlands farm wife dismissing a compliment and not the sophisticated lady of an hour or so earlier. She’d been smoking all evening but her long silver cigarette holder was nowhere to be seen. Denise for that matter had ceased to appear girlish, had as effectively suppressed that side of her personality as she had seemed to make the piano disappear by closing its lid. Only the King remained in character, and it occurred to me to wonder whether that wasn’t what differentiated him finally, that what made a king a king was the power of his concentration, that what may, as Denise put it, have started as an accident of birth wasn’t maintained by some absolute act of the will. How else account for the staying power of a reign, our image of kings—and queens too—as persons, whatever their age, continuing in their primes, long enough at any rate to put their stamp upon an era?

(I don’t want my readers to think I was that objective, already this journalist of a princess manqué taking notes, recording her impressions. Not a bit of it! I was swept up, I was plenty swept up. So swept up, in fact, I never took Lawrence up on his offer to run off to the Tower with him to have for engagement ring the Crown Jewel of my choice, but kept instead the fussy costume-jewelry ring I had bought for myself on the ground floor of a Los Angeles department store and had shown to the reporters back in Cape Henry. So I was swept up all right, plenty shook by these people, as much taken by them as any who pay their good money to read this stuff. Still, a girl will have her instincts, won’t she, Sir Sidney?)

Having pumped Charlotte up with her reassurances, Denise now made an effort to reinforce her original entrance, displaying her earlier, larkier pedigree. Turning back the clock, she mimed an excited, jumpy applause, impaling herself, whatever her reasons, on some sort of dismal, faked enthusiasm.

She seized on me as if I were someone from the audience pressed into service to assist her.

“Never mind, dear,” she assured me, “rudeness is just Alec’s way. It isn’t as if he means anything by it. It’s only his way of getting attention without actually having to try to kill anyone. His bark is way worse than his bite, though, once you get to know him, that is. It’s really too devastating he’s not here though. I shall never forgive him. No. I shall never forgive him. We’d planned to take you round Knightsbridge to show you to all our mates. Have you your card with you? Not to worry, we can have one made up in the morning. Did you know, incidentally, it was Alec’s idea to reintroduce the calling card back into society? If there’s nothing to do, sometimes we’ll both take up a bunch of them and drive out in my Jag to Croyden or Putney or Willesden Green and pop them through the postal slots of some of the ratepayers. Can you imagine the looks on their faces?
Such
fun!

“I
know,” she said, “we can call on some of the cousins. We can call on Cousin Nancy, we can call on cousins Heide and Jeanne and Alice and Anne—— Cousin Anne is in town, isn’t she, Lawrence? I say, Lawrence—oh look, he’s blushing—is Cousin Anne in town?”

“Leave off, will you, Denise!” my intended yelled at her.

“Pa,” she appealed, “make him stop. Show him who’s King.”

“The both of you stop.”

“Oh all right,” she said, “I won’t show you Nanc—I mean Anne.”

“Denise!”

“Anyway,” the Princess confided, “often—well, sometimes—Alec and I—— Oh, speak of the devil.”

And, suddenly, someone who could, in accordance with all his advance notices, only have been Alec, blustered into the room. He was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk. His clothes were torn. Alec the Rude, glancing once about him, at Charlotte and George, at his sister Denise, at his brother Lawrence, the King-in-waiting who’d been off working the world and whom he couldn’t have seen in at least two months, looked in my direction, came toward me, bowed deeply, and kissed my hand loud as you please, quite solidly, and dead center on its costume-jewelry ring finger.

Sunday, February 2, 1992

How He Courted Me

It wasn’t jealousy as you and I know it. Well, it wasn’t jealousy at all, really. No matter what you’ve read in the press, the truth is I was never attracted to Alec. I don’t
really
think he was attracted to me. I’m not telling any tales out of school if I remind the public that Prince Alec is not highly sexed, only heavily hormoned. His skin, if you look closely, is actually rather fair and only appears swarthy because of the dense stubble of five-o’clock shadow that covers it. I don’t know why he doesn’t grow a beard. Unless of course the vaguely tough-guy look on his handsome, somewhat disheveled face is something he deliberately cultivates. Like the dust-up (rather than car crash) it turns out he provoked on the evening of my first visit to the palace. Which is why, really, I was never attracted to Alec.

Well, put yourself in my place. Knowing, I mean, what I knew. About, I mean, that business of their never being brought up on charges. Mere Figureheads? Symbolic power? I should think not. No, they
can’t
take us into foreign wars and don’t even have all that much say-so in domestic matters. They couldn’t, I daresay, fix a ticket for anyone below the rank of a marquess. But forget about not being allowed to make laws or fix tickets. But not ever having to answer to anyone? Symbolic power? Power like theirs, the power, I mean, to run amok with impunity, is the most seductive and dangerous power there is. So so much, I say, for the pretty myth of their Figureheadhood!

Yet there’s no denying it. It is seductive. All that force, all that dash and fire, all that vim and verve. To wink at precept and live in some perpetual state of willful disregard the indulged, insouciant life is a temptation indeed. I was not tempted.

I am, I think at least as much a woman as Prince Alec is a man. Where he is testosteronagenous and aggressive, I am largely progesterogenic and nurturing. And I never forgot that Alec is a bully—is this libelous? let them go prove it— and that too much of his bravura is vouchsafed by his princely immunities. If he was bloody, muddy, bruised, and drunk, if his clothes were torn, what had he to lose in a dust-up? He’s on the National Health, his clothing allowance is seventy-five thousand pounds a year. You should see the other guy.

To his credit, Lawrence was not jealous. To mine, I never gave him reason to be.

(Sid, let them bring
me
up on charges. Let them just try! In this La Lulu-Tells-All enterprise we’re supposed to be engaged in here, let me remind them that I
haven’t
done, I haven’t told all, not yet I haven’t. Only what relates to me. And this isn’t blackmail. I haven’t asked for a penny of their money. I wouldn’t, I won’t. And if they try to put me under a gag order, I’ll just take my story somewhere else. I’ll get in with the Yanks and give it away free to the paper with the highest circulation!)

So.

On then to my whirlwind courtship, my introduction to the British press, my background, who my people are, what I did for love, et cetera, et cetera.

The public’s up to here with most of this anyway, so I’ll simply synopsize what they already know, or think they know, throwing in where warranted one or two of my theories.

Of course it really isn’t enough for me to state that Alec and I were not attracted to each other. Who would believe me? In light of all that photographic evidence? It’s only natural the public would want some proof to counter the claims that we were up to something. In a civilization like ours, where each new dawn brings with it a fresh breath of scandal, in our Where-There’s-Smoke-There’s-Fire world, in this brave new age of nolo contendere and out-of-court settlements, the tendency is to believe in the failure of human character. Well. Unfortunately I can offer no proof. However, I think I can supply the reader with a context, what proper journalists call a backgrounder.

Consider England’s circumstances, the sociology of our times. Despite anything I may have said, or, rather,
because
everything I’ve said about the deeply cynical nature of the Zeitgeist is true, our sudden appearance in the social sky was welcomed, even applauded. It is simply in the nature of things when they are at their worst to hope for the best. What better time to hope for the best? Very well then, I come along, or Prince Lawrence does and I come along with him. It’s announced we’re engaged, that your future King has chosen his future Consort. We are both an item and a distraction, something like a hopeful leitmotif in an otherwise dreary composition. We not only know we’re a field day for the press, we positively count on it. Because it’s true, all the world does too love a lover. They size me up, they eye my breasts, they look at my legs.

I am, quite literally, presented at Court. We have become, the two of us, a Season unto ourselves. It’s middle to latish summer, just after Wimbledon, about. A time of hampers and picnics in people’s private deer parks. We go round to meet the peerage in their stately homes—— dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts and lowly barons. I meet the Lawrence’s grandparents. (Sid, I
haven’t
told all. Only what relates to me. This
isn’t
blackmail!) I meet some of those famous cousins of Larry’s, and am surprised at how plain they are—— astonished at this one’s buck teeth and that one’s incipient hump. And am seized by a sudden shyness when they look too knowingly at me.

The paparazzi are having a field day. They are meant to, of course. This exercise is as much for them as it is for us. They are to be my conduit into the homes of my prospective subjects. (La, will you just listen to me with my count- my-chickens? Pride goeth before a fall.) Butlers and gillies and that magic show-biz retinue of Larry’s that I hadn’t been conscious of since we got off the yacht have been given instructions to let them be as we make our way through the daily round. They are not to be disturbed so long as they stay in the trees or hide in the bushes with their long lenses and special equipment. At certain houses they are even given sandwiches and offered tall, cool glasses of milk.

As our tour continued during those three or four weeks of visits in that spectacular English summer when the conditions for photography, that smashing, perfect balance of light and shade, were so ripe that the dullest of that gang of paparazzi would have had to forget to load their cameras or remove their lens covers to fail to get perfect pictures, the family affair became a family affair. I mean we were joined by Larry’s sisters and brothers.

I mean—— enter Alec.

The man had an absolute instinct for when a picture was about to be taken. Oh, how that horser-arounder could horse around! It was uncanny. Quicker than an f-stop or the setting of the shutter speed, he could reach across a field of vision and thrust himself into a photograph without leaving even the faintest trace of a blur. He was, that is, a scene stealer par excellence, and probably inherited his natural gifts for mugging, timing, and blocking from the innate theatricality of his parents. (Because Darwin was right, Sid. I’m just a simple celebrity, just this year’s flash in the pan, but even I can see that when, over the years, the necessity for monarchs to be the stalwarts of eras and policies dropped away, they must have oh so gradually adapted and become instead these figures for pageantry, this little, highly specialized race of creatures who are at their best set off in golden coaches, as fashioned for tableau vivant as if they’d been invented by tailors and jewelers.) At any rate, Alec was a sort of genius of displacement. He could so dispose imself—by a look, by a gesture—that it often appeared in these photographs as if I were looking at him admiringly, even though my attention may actually have been engaged by some particularly astonishing effect in one of the fabulous gardens on one of the fabulous estates we happened to be visiting that weekend. Conversely, he could somehow intuit when my face was about to assume what, for lack of a better term, I can only call a compromising expression, and then flash some last-minute smile of yearning and longing in my direction. Or, magically, he might appear next to me in certain photographs where I cannot even recall his being part of the group. In these pictures our eyes seem to be holding hands.

“Look here, Alec,” I told him one day, “this will have to stop.”

“Whatever are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Those photographs of us that appear in the papers and magazines.”

“It’s not
my
fault there’s freedom of the press in this country.
Areopagitica,
don’t you know.”

“Just stop it that’s all. Columnists are beginning to suggest things.”

“I wonder why,” Alec said. “I have no interest in you.”

He was telling the truth. I think it was out of simple mischief he did these things. Alec was rather like one of those irrepressibles, a best man, say, who might thrust his finger up behind the groom’s head in the formal wedding portrait.

In the event, Larry was never jealous and, if he ever harbored even the least suspicion about either of us he gave no hint. It was Princess Denise to whom it occurred that something might be fishy. In my own, Lawrence’s, and Their Majesties’ presence she brought it up herself, and in almost the same abrupt words I had used.

“Ho hum ho hum hum ho,” replied Alec.

“He’s your
brother,”
Denise said.

“Yes, I know. Lawrence the Steady.”

“Good lord, Alec, sometimes you can make me so cross!”

“I love all my children equally,” Charlotte put in.

“I love all my
children
equally,” King George said, giving the line a different reading.

Prince Lawrence barely looked up from the charts he was preparing for our honeymoon voyage.

Well. Alec didn’t bother to stop pulling his faces even after Denise and I called his attention to those potentially damaging photographs. You will recall, I’m sure, what he said the single time he was directly challenged about any of this by a member of the press. “You may say,” he said without blinking an eye, “that Louise and I are just good friends.”